by Jill Ciment
Then the alternate approaches the microphones. He asks the audience if everyone can hear him. He introduces the man with him as his lawyer and agent. He says he hasn’t prepared a statement but will take questions.
“Us Weekly,” a reporter introduces himself. “Did the whole jury know about the affair, and do you believe the jury was able to reach an impartial verdict under the circumstances?”
The alternate shields his lips, whispers something to his lawyer and agent. Hannah guesses that he doesn’t know what “impartial” means.
If he wants to sell his story to the tabloids, he will have to shoehorn himself into it. “I was the one who caught her going into his room in the middle of the night. I was getting ice. She pretended she had the wrong room. I didn’t say anything, because I was only an alternate at that point.”
“The Orlando Sentinel,” another reporter introduces herself. “How did the jury divide over the question of guilt?”
“We all voted guilty on the first round except for…am I allowed to say names? We all thought Hannah only voted not guilty to get back at Doc—we called him Doc—because he dumped her.”
She turns off the tablet, sets it facedown on the armrest, and heads to her husband’s study to see if he has been watching too. He isn’t there. The screen is frozen on a game of Solitaire. He won.
She finds him in the bedroom, putting on his shoes, collecting his keys.
“I’m seeing Leavitt at ten. There was a cancellation.”
“I want to go with you.”
He looks at her as if she is glare itself. “Your name was just released. Do you mind if I don’t want my doctor’s appointment turned into your soap opera?”
“I’ll wait in the car.”
“It never occurred to you that it would end like this?”
His fury has returned, but it is no longer biblical. It is Talmudic. He guns the Prius, as if the silent electric car can muster rage, before fishtailing away.
* * *
· · ·
did you watch the press conference? she texts Graham.
did you go? he texts back.
Her phone vibrates with an incoming call, a number she doesn’t recognize.
a reporter is calling, she texts.
don’t answer.
Another tremor from an unknown caller.
write down the number, he texts. alert the court. the judge ruled reporters were not allowed to contact us.
She can see by the three lights flashing in Graham’s thought bubble that he has more to say.
I wish I could see you.
The incoming calls don’t stop. The count by the voicemail icon is now at nine. On the tenth ring, her husband’s name appears.
“Hy?” she answers.
“You speak to her,” she hears her husband tell someone.
“This is Dr. Leavitt,” says a concerned male voice. “My nurse has been trying to reach you. I’m afraid the news isn’t good. Your husband has leukemia.”
“Tell her the prognosis,” she hears her husband say in the background.
“Your husband wants me to tell you the prognosis,” says the doctor. His elocution of the word “prognosis” is so much more grounded than her husband’s anguished version.
“If we give him transfusions, and if he can tolerate the transfusions, maybe months.”
“And if he can’t tolerate them?” Hannah asks.
“Weeks.”
“Are there no other treatments?”
“We could do a bone-marrow biopsy.”
“And what would that tell us?”
“Whether he has weeks or months.”
“There’s nothing experimental, a trial?”
“Not at his age.”
Is her husband sitting right there, listening?
“May I talk to him?”
“Hello, who is this?” asks her husband.
“Me.”
“Did you talk to the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you the prognosis?” This time his pronunciation of the word “prognosis” is closer to the doctor’s, if the word “grounded” included planets other than Earth.
* * *
· · ·
He is asleep in the crowded waiting area on a chair under a television tuned to the HGTV channel when she arrives. His blood guy practices in the hematology department of the university’s medical center, a vast complex of buildings connected by underground tunnels, like termite hills.
Under the hammering and sawing on the television where a renovation is under way, her husband, head back, mouth open, looks more unconscious than asleep.
She should have insisted on going with him. There had been no need to worry about her infamy here. Among the souls hunkered in wheelchairs and attached to drips, her soap opera is but a stepped-on anthill.
She kneels before him and puts her head on his lap. “I’m sorry you had to hear this alone,” she says.
The arm that wears a cotton ball with a dollop of blood in the crux of the elbow stirs. He takes her hand.
“I’m so discouraged,” he says.
“The doctor told me that with transfusions, you could have months.”
“Only months?”
“You ready to get out of here?” she asks in her bravest voice, neither contralto nor mezzo-soprano, but tinny.
He slumps into the wheelchair that the nurse provides to help Hannah navigate him to the Prius. He thinks he remembers that he parked the car in the first of four concrete towers, or maybe it was the second tower? She pushes him up and down ramps. She can’t tell if pushing uphill is harder than braking downhill. The medical center’s parking lot should provide emergency lanes for runaway wheelchairs, like steep highways do for runaway trucks. Just as she is about to give up and call a cab, she presses the Unlock button on her key fob one last time, and the Prius calls back to them.
He sleeps all the way home. She struggles to get him into bed. She draws all the blinds, in case reporters are lurking about undeterred by the judge’s ruling. She unplugs the landline, powers off her cell and his. Finally, she has a chance to sit down, collect herself, and take a moment to listen to the crushing silence.
Her husband sleeps all afternoon and evening. Even so, she waits until his normal bedtime before she emails Graham. She needs a second opinion, and he is the only doctor she knows who will read her email after midnight.
She lists everything the doctor told her and all her husband’s stats and counts and tests. She provides Graham with the username and password of her husband’s medical records, so he can see past test results and judge the progress of the disease. She types, Do you agree with the prognosis?
“Has something else happened?” her husband asks, standing in her studio doorway. He looks like himself, as he was this morning, before he left for the doctor, like a man who has years.
“I’m on a website where you can get a second opinion,” she says, pressing Send.
He sits on the chair purchased from IKEA more than twenty-six years ago.
“Dr. Leavitt called it ‘galloping’ cancer,” he says.
“What an awful term.”
“I always thought I would die in my sleep, just not wake up one day.”
“That’s because you’re an optimist,” Hannah says.
“Will you finish my memoir?”
She can’t tell if he is serious. “Isn’t a memoir an act of memory,” she says.
“I’ve reached the years after you came into my life. You know what happens.”
“Yes,” she promises him, though she knows she will file the memoir away unfinished, in a box she will later send to the university to join his other papers in the archives, a warren of vaults under the library.
As soon as her husband f
alls asleep again, she returns to her studio to see if Graham has answered her. Tens of emails, with usernames like AncaEyelashes, fill her inbox. The subject lines read: “Yes, now we know who the stupidest people in the world are,” “I know where you live.”
Finally, she finds Graham’s answer.
Yes, I agree with the prognosis.
* * *
· · ·
The studio’s glass wall, especially at night, always makes her feel like prey, as if an owl could swoop in and grab her by her hair. She douses the lights. It is so dark in the woods by the lake. Is someone out there, a reporter willing to break the court order, or is it Death coming for her husband?
As she enters their bedroom, she hears him crying. He is wracked in sobs, wracked as in that instrument of torture—the medieval rack.
She gives him his privacy until the sobs subside. He has every right to cry for what is about to be taken from him. Everything.
When she finally returns to bed, he says, “It’s hard to believe that I’m not going to be here in a few weeks.”
She crosses the mattress to hold him. The mattress is made of a space-age sponge that conforms to the body. She sinks into the hollow he has made for himself.
“You could have months,” she says.
“It’s just as impossible to accept that I’m not going to be here in a few months,” he says.
She can’t think of a response, because there is none.
“Distract me, please,” he says.
“You want me to read to you?”
“I want you to talk to me.”
“Anything?”
“I just need to hear your voice.”
Her husband has always distracted himself with legal thrillers.
“Would you like to know why I thought Anca was guilty?”
“Yes.”
She begins with the evidence, but evidence—burned as opposed to singed eyelashes, paint thinner as opposed to gasoline—isn’t distracting enough for a man who has only weeks to live.
She changes her strategy. She describes Anca’s expressionless sketchbook face, the far prettier twin sister, the incremental turning of Anca’s head, the affectless confession, and the chocolate bars consumed during closing arguments.
“She displayed emotion only once during the entire trial. When her twin sister testified about the time Anca’s dachshund ate a sago nut and died,” Hannah tells him.
All her husband says in response is “Did the dog suffer?”
In a curtained room, a nurse offers her husband the choice of either a hospital bed or an armchair to use while he undergoes the transfusion. His full weight is on Hannah’s arm. Over the past twenty-four hours his decline has been just as Dr. Leavitt said: galloping. He chooses the chair even though Hannah knows he wants the bed, because choosing the bed would be giving in.
The nurse returns with the blood cart, enough bags of blood for a horror film.
“Is this all for me?” her husband asks.
“We’ll start with one,” the nurse says.
Hannah needs a cigarette. “I’m going for a cup of coffee,” she tells her husband. “You want one?”
“Am I allowed to drink?” he asks the nurse.
“As long as it’s not alcohol,” the nurse says, hanging a bag of blood from a hook over the chair in which her husband fidgets. The stiff vinyl armchair is to a normal armchair what a pair of diabetic shoes is to Italian loafers.
Hannah leaves the hospital and searches for a place to smoke. She doesn’t care that the university forbids smoking. Let them arrest her. She joins two other rebels who are puffing away near the ambulance bay. The volume of patients funneling into the medical center looks like a pilgrimage to Lourdes. She knows Graham works nearby. She can’t help but look for him. She doesn’t necessarily want to speak to him, just to see him. This yearning isn’t going to end anytime soon.
A woman, tugging her toddler by the wrist, approaches Hannah. “I hope you drown!” she says, scooping the child up and striding away.
Hannah isn’t sure if the fury was directed at her cigarette or the verdict. Why did she say “drown”? Did she read C-2’s profile in the Sentinel? Swims for recreation.
She crushes out her cigarette and returns to the man tethered to the bag of blood.
“You forgot my coffee,” he says when he notices that she is empty-handed.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You still want one?”
“Never mind, Dr. Death wants to talk to us about my wishes.”
Is he hallucinating? Is she?
“Who is Dr. Death?”
“I overheard the nurses call him that. Nice guy. His specialty is palliative care. He wants me to sign a DNR. I told him no.”
The bag of blood doesn’t appear to be any emptier than when she left.
A young slender Indian man steps through the curtain.
“This is the doctor I was telling you about. My wife, Mrs. Richler.”
It takes Hannah a second to realize that her husband is referring to her. She never took his name. Mrs. Richler is what she calls her husband’s former wives.
“Mrs. Richler,” the doctor says, “I told your husband earlier that it was entirely up to him whether or not he wants to be resuscitated if his heart stops.”
Her husband pulls at the blanket, bites a cuticle.
She kneels before him. “You want the doctors to try everything?” she asks.
He removes his glasses, cleans them with the hospital sheet. He still doesn’t entirely trust her, but what choice does he have.
“If there’s hope,” he says at last.
“He’s not going to sign,” she tells the doctor.
“What happens to me after my heart is resuscitated?” her husband asks.
“We would probably have to induce a coma for both the pain and the intubation.”
“The pain?”
“At your age, bones break easily. Most likely, many of your ribs will be fractured from the chest compressions.”
“Where do I sign?”
Hannah is given a wallet-size version of the signed DNR to keep on her at all times.
The bag takes three more hours to empty. The nurse comes in with a second bag.
“Enough,” her husband says.
* * *
· · ·
In the parking garage, wheeling her husband to the car, she again has that sense of being prey. Someone is stalking her. She reels around, strides toward the pillar where she is positive she saw the glint of a lens.
An overweight man, puddled in sweat, and necklaced by telephonic lenses, hides as best he can.
What could she possibly yell at him that he hasn’t heard before?
“Enough!” she yells.
By the time she gets back to her husband, the wheelchair has drifted downhill. Her husband is braking with his outstretched sandaled feet. She catches him just before the curve.
“How could you leave me alone?” he asks.
Feet planted on the floor, he is half off the bed, half on, the posture of a man who has passed out from a night of hard drinking, but the scene lacks all the joys of inebriation. Only a drunken old poet would imagine that he is going to rage against the dying of the light. At whom? Death is excessively attentive. Death taps her husband’s shoulder each time he falls asleep, startling him awake only long enough to remember that he is going to die. Death puts ice packs on his already cold feet. Death fills his bladder so that if he should stay asleep and forget that he is going to die, urgency reminds him.
She covers him with a blanket.
“Did the doctor call?” he asks without opening his eyes.
“Were you expecting him to?”
“He should have the blood test results by now, see if the transfusion worked.”
“I can look up the test results online.”
“We won’t know what the numbers mean.”
“I can get an answer from that second-opinion site I told you about.”
* * *
· · ·
Graham confirms what she already knows: the transfusion hasn’t had much of an impact on the numbers.
She sits on the bed’s edge next to her husband, but she doesn’t touch him. He screamed out in pain the last time she hugged him.
“I already know,” he says. “It didn’t work.”
She tells him that she would give him ten years from the remainder of her life if she could.
“I would never accept them,” he says.
“We have a decision to make,” she says. “When the time comes, do you want to go to the hospital or stay at home?”
He looks at her as if he has forgotten that he is going to die, and she just reminded him.
“Here or the hospital?” she repeats.
“Here?”
“Here?”
“Here,” he says.
* * *
· · ·
The hospice nurse is a large Jamaican woman with a buck-up joviality that Hannah can see her husband trusts. She opens the drapes, which haven’t been opened since the release of Hannah’s identity.
“We prefer them closed,” Hannah tells her.
The nurse examines her husband, who is now sitting up in bed.
“Aren’t you going to take my blood pressure?” he asks.
“You don’t need to worry about your blood pressure any longer,” the nurse says.
“I don’t have to take my pills?”
Hannah can see that her husband is gobsmacked by the finality of not having to worry about his blood pressure.
“What about my pain pills?” he asks.
“We have better ones,” the nurse says. “Do you like ice cream?”
“Who doesn’t?” he says.
“You can now eat as much ice cream as you want.”